


Together After The War

by telekinesiskid



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Jealousy, POV Second Person, Self-Harm, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 06:46:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5487626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose promised Pearl "a life together after the war". But it's not quite as "together" as Pearl wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Together After The War

**Author's Note:**

> Part no. 12572492 of my saga: Pearl is sad and messed up because ROSE.
> 
> Apologies for the weirdly descriptive scene with dialogue in the middle - this fic was written across many months and suffered a lot of cut and pasting :v hopefully it's still okay............

You won the war.

You have no idea how you did it, but you did. Rose did, that is.

You don’t remember very much of the final battle. You remember that too many of your allies were falling too fast, gems shattered and splintered right out of the air, like a rain of coloured glass in the light, piercing your skin, and you remember that Rose was crying when she grabbed your arm. Her face was soaked in tears, her teeth grit, her head down, her eyes screwed shut tight. You remember asking her if she was hurt, but you couldn’t see any physical injury on her.

She told you that it was time to fuse now, and you did, oh God you _did –_ you wanted to be so close and so in tune with her that you tried to bypass the synchronisation altogether.

You didn’t expect that Ruby and Sapphire would fuse with you too. But that was okay.

You’d never felt so part of a _team_ and so whole and so lost from yourself. Your useless, pathetic, pitiful self.

 

You understood later. She wanted to mourn, to grieve for her fallen ones, but she couldn’t. She was still in the midst of battle, still fighting. Her tears were wasted on those who couldn’t be put back together again.

You remember that she spent hours just holding the little shards – barely half of what you’d managed to scrape up in the battlefields – cupped in her palms as she cried for them. Her tears made pools.

 

You don’t know what you were expecting. You didn’t really imagine the carnage would be as bad as it was. Your battles wiped out large chunks of the Earth, of forests, rivers, plains, mountains, entire groups of civilised natives.

You never thought you owed very much to them in the same way that Rose did. You and countless other noble gems had risked their very lives and lost their _home_ to save Earth from immeasurable annihilation. You hardly thought that they were entitled to any reparations to their primitive little tribes that they could just rebuild out of mud and bark. If anything, they should’ve _thanked_ you. Instead, all they did was scream inarticulately at you and raise their crude spears to your throats.

Rose kept assuring you that the humans weren’t chimps, but you still had yet to see a discernible difference. If their brains were so big, then why didn’t they use them?

If only they could’ve understood that this was the _best_ possible outcome. There were causalities on all sides. There was no way that could’ve been prevented. So they may as well have stopped complaining about it.

You don’t worry about it. They’ll all have forgotten in a generation or two anyway.

 

You don’t know why she spent so much time among them. She was a Goddess amongst slime that had barely crawled out from the sea. They worshipped her, depicted her, recreated her image on the walls of caves. None of them were very good artists and could fully capture her beauty, but Rose seemed to like them all the same.

You never understood. Why did she like them so much? Why did she partake in their strange and colourful but unhygienic rituals? Why did she have carnal relations with them?

Why didn’t she spend much time with you?

Where they just better than you?

Did… she prefer their company to yours?

 

She tells you one day, almost a century later, that you all ought to check in on Kindergarten. To ensure that it’s all still inactive.

Any uneasy feelings you harbour about returning to Kindergarten are passed over when Rose offers. A trip with Rose is a trip with Rose, no matter where that might take you.

You don’t complain when Garnet comes along too.

 

There’s not a scrap of green to the canyons. You’ve watched entire mountains split right in two with the intervening force of nature, but everything is dead here. Dead and lifeless. Sunlight hasn’t touched these rocks and it never will. They’re damp to the touch and feel like ice. No wind. Everything’s just… dead. It’s so different to the rest of the Earth.

You think you hear clanging, in the distance. Deep underground. A pale constant roar- like the few seconds leading up to an earthquake.

You tell them, but no one stops.

You run up to them. You _insist_ that you hear something – a sort of semi-regular pattern with no wind to explain it – but Garnet doesn’t bother to soothe your nerves; she tells you that it’s just your imagination and to keep moving forward. One of the Injectors shudders as you pass and you _squeal –_ you make a mad dash for Rose and curl around her warm arm. She runs a finger down your spine, where you already have chills.

You hear a chuckle from behind and you look over your shoulder to glare at Garnet, always grinning, like you’re her own form of on-the-go entertainment.

You don’t like seeing those two fused all the time, outside of battle. It’s different. Rose tells you that it’s fine, but you’re still getting used to it.

If anything, you miss talking with Sapphire.

All three of you startle when you hear the echoed unmistakable laugh of a child, and your first impulse is to throw your arm out in front of Rose, draw a fresh sword from your gem. But Rose stops you. She’s made you wait before – she places too high a price on the safety of human children. But you’re not sure it is human. You don’t know how a human could’ve stumbled upon this place and still lived; nothing grows here. Nothing to sustain life.

You feel Garnet’s breath just behind you, hot and ready for action. You dread it.

“Hello?” Rose asks, and it’s not a tone that she uses on her foes. It’s playful, light. You think perhaps she’s noticed something that you haven’t. “Is someone following us?”

You follow her line of vision. You start at two little eyes watching the three of you from behind a boulder, deep purple.

“You don’t need to be afraid of us, little one,” Rose assures, and after a pause a little gem crawls out. She’s about half the size of you and a fraction the size of Rose, impossibly small. She blinks at the three of you, her eyes wide and full of wonder, awestruck. She doesn’t look afraid of you at all. She asks in a small voice, tentatively happy, “You guys have rocks too?”

Your eyes drop down to her chest. You notice the cut and colour of her gem – a quartz – and Garnet must’ve thought the same, because you both arm yourselves at the same time.

You scare the young gem away, into one of the many, many burrowed holes in the chasm. Rose chastises you, and but you don’t feel ashamed for just carrying out your duty as a knight. She tells you both to put your weapons away and you watch her, terrified, as she kneels before the little hole at the base.

“It’s safe,” Garnet declares to you, and you wheel around to face her.

“Safe? What makes you think it’s safe?” You’re annoyed as you sound. You throw Rose a quick glance just to make sure that she’s still okay. “This is a Kindergarten _quartz_ we’re dealing with!”

“I bet that hole is her one over there,” Garnet points to the hole that the little gem scrambled into, like how rodents dive into their burrows at the first sign of trouble. “Notice how small it is? And see that boulder just there, blocking it? I think she missed the whole war. I think she doesn’t even know what she is.”

“She’s still dangerous,” you insist, even as Garnet shakes her head and hums a negative. “She’s still a product of Kindergarten made to _annihilate_ the earth! We have to take her out, just like we did with all the other quartz that came from this place.”

“…Or,” Garnet deadpans, “we could make her an ally.”

You’re just about to tell Garnet that it’s a _preposterous_ notion when Rose interrupts you both, clearing her throat. She looks unnaturally proud and maternal as she puts her hands on the little gem’s shoulders, presenting her to you both. “Crystal Gems, I’d like you to meet Amethyst. She’s a little under 500 years old.”

“Apparently that’s young,” she says, with a shrug.

“It’s very young,” Garnet agrees, and you’re absolutely astounded and betrayed to see that Garnet is _smiling._ “Hello Amethyst. I’m Garnet.”

The little gem’s eyes bulge at her. “You’re… You’re really cool.”

“Thank you.”

You cross your arms and say nothing.

“That’s Pearl,” Garnet supplies for you.

“Woah, cool… Crystal Gems.” Amethyst’s eyes swell with tears but she blinks around them. “I didn’t think there was anyone else like me. Just other rocks that didn’t talk much. Seeing you guys is really…” She doesn’t finish that train of thought. Rose pats her on the head, prompting her to look up and smile, like she hasn’t seen the sun before but she has a fairly good idea of what its warmth should feel like. “So um… there are others like me, right, that came from these holes? What happened to them?”

“We killed them,” you say.

If Amethyst stares at Rose like the sun, she stares at you like you’re perpetual winter.

“Pearl,” Rose starts with you gently, and your irritated eyes flick over to her. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh nothing,” you snap. “Please, don’t worry about me – I’m absolutely fine. Ignore me.”

“We will,” Garnet threatens in a small voice, and you scowl at her. You throw Rose another desperate look, another sneer of disdain down at the young quartz, and then you turn heel and leave. You tell them that you’ll see them back at the cave.

You hope that they won’t take that thing home with them, but they do. Against your better judgement.

You don’t want another Crystal Gem. Sometimes, on your more bitter days, you think there are too many already.

 

You don’t like her. She always seems inexplicably drawn to trouble – like a moth drawn to flame. You feel as though you spend a disproportionate amount of time cleaning up after her blunders, solving her disputes with the natives, chasing after her when she works herself up with excitement, always shouting her name like it physically causes you pain: _“Amethyst!”_

Your voice is worn out by week one.

You don’t know how you’ll spend the rest of your life with her. You were supposed to spend the rest of your life with _Rose._ “Together after war”: that’s what she said – that’s what she _promised_ –

You take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

 

Less and less time is spent on missions to track down corrupt gems, and more time is spent on the obscure little family unit you all are. Amethyst takes to Rose like she would a mother, a doting parent. Whenever she injuries herself, scares herself, runs into you on one of your bad days, she always runs to Rose, like she used to run to her crawl space for safety.

Rose tells you that you ought not to be so cruel to her. But you think that Rose is too indulgent, too willing to overlook her misbehaviour. You throw out all the trash and rotten food you found in Amethyst’s secret hoard, and Rose actually had the gall to be mad at _you._

You hadn’t realised she was so impatient to have a rodent infestation.

 

You roll your eyes when Amethyst hurts herself. It happens so often now that it had stopped being a matter of urgency long ago. She throws herself from a cliff and cuts her gem and she makes a big show of being out of sorts. Rose falls for it every time.

You watch from afar, feeling hot with tears and a keen, raw sense of abandonment, as Rose sits down to let Amethyst curl in her lap, like a domesticated animal. Rose touches Amethyst’s gem, runs her fingers over it in a way that makes your toes curl. You watch on as tears start to drip from Rose’s eyes onto Amethyst’s gem, and the cracks seal together like new.

Great, you think. She’s fine. You tap your foot and wait for Amethyst to receive a little kiss and run off to play in the mud, or whatever it is she does, and return Rose’s company to _you,_ but she doesn’t. She whispers three little words that she says so _easily –_ like she doesn’t even really mean them – like she doesn’t even know what they _mean –_ and she stays there in Rose’s lap for a nap that she _doesn’t even need._

You storm away. You angrily rub something out of your eye.

 

The first time Rose cries for you, you’re not sure how to feel about it. You don’t even notice at first. You just limp into the temple – your new home – and you keep your head down as you murmur your safe return. Your ears prick at the sudden wet sobs from across the way. You turn and you see her, eyes wide, and she’s _crying_ for you, she’s…

You’ve never seen such a beautiful sight in all your life.

You stumble over your own words as you rush out appeasements – you’re fine, nothing happened, it was just an accident, it’s barely a scratch, hardly worth healing – but you can’t stop her from coming towards you, all grace and balance and care, and the swish of her rose-petal dress still makes your knees weak, even after all this time.

Or, maybe that’s just your cracked gem.

You’re captivated by her as she comes to stand before you, reverently tall, worthy of immortalising in a million statues, and her warm hands find their place on your cheeks. You feel your whole face burn green. Your eyes flutter shut as you both quiet and she drops a kiss onto the peak of your gem.

You feel her tears on your skin, dripped down from your hairline, curling around your broken gem, and you feel whole again.

She pulls away, opens her eyes and smiles at you. You breathe out your undying gratitude and she wipes her tears away from your face, and you don’t pull her hand away, no matter how much you just want her to leave them there. Those tears were shed for _you_ and you alone.

She has things to do. She’s called away by Garnet and she remembers to tell you goodbye before she takes off.

 

You try to hold onto that feeling of _wholeness,_ but over time it slips away from you and leaves you feeling incomplete, inadequate.

And you realise, somewhat miserably, that this has always been your base state. This is just you. This is how you feel without her.

 

You get careless in battle, fighting the corrupt gems scattered about the earth. You smile when you spot their rogue formations and you’re still smiling even as they dodge your bad aim and smack you head-first into solid rock.

You hear the hard _chip_ of your gem on impact and you think you almost get a glimpse of a memory; of what it’s like to be repaired, to be new and whole and perfect. To be loved.

She infuriates Garnet as she lets the monster flee in favour of tending to you. Amethyst stares at you dolefully and you stare back at her, fighting the smile from your thin lips. Rose tells you that you’re going to be okay, that you’re just having a bad streak lately, that you’ll get out of your rut soon, and she picks you up and cradles you and carries you to the temple. You put your arms around her neck and press your face into her hair – into those curls that always seem to smell like real roses.

She lays with you for a while and rocks you and cries for you, not on demand but because she genuinely cares about you.

Your eyes turn rosy and you reminisce about when it was just you and her, back on Homeworld, and she cries a little more than usual. You think your gem might be indestructible now.

God, you hope not.

 

One day, both you and Amethyst crack your gems on the same mission.

She cries for you.

Second. After Amethyst.

You think about that a little more than you should.

 

She cries for you.

But it’s not special.

She cries for everybody.

She doesn’t differentiate.

Your cracked gem is no more serious than Amethyst’s.

The realisation is unbearable. It crushes you tight, cuts you deep, clogs up your throat and chokes you and makes breathing without sobbing such a ridiculous amount of _effort_ that you don’t much care to apply.

The others decide to go on a mission without you and you feel just as abandoned by them as Homeworld. You stare at Amethyst by Rose’s side, and you feel replaced.

You stay at the temple, like they want. Until you “feel better”. You sit in front of the crystalline wall and fail to keep busy, to keep calm, to keep your thoughts under control. You’re useless and you can’t do _anything._ Why did Rose even bother to save you? Did she even mean to save you? Or were you just _there,_ because you’re obviously so infatuated with her that of course you’d stub a few of her toes, getting in her way?

Your head rests against the cool wall. You draw it back and throw it hard at the wall.

_Crack._

You hit your gem again.

_Crack._

Every hit just seems to-

_Crack._

-split your head, right in two.

_Crack._

But you can’t stop.

_Crack._

It’s really starting to hurt now, it’s really starting to-

_Crack._

_-_ chip away, and flakes of _you_ fall on your knees-

_Crack._

_-_ but you can’t seem to stop, you can’t seem to-

_Crack._

-stop yourself, and you’re doing _too much damage,_ it’s just-

_Crack._

-too much, and you want to _STOP_ but-

_Crack._

_Crack._

_Cra-_

 

You don’t remember any of it. They say your eyes were open and scared, but you don’t remember Rose tearing in, the others in hot pursuit, Rose forcibly taking you away from the wall to see the damage and _screaming_. All you remember is slowly coming awake – it’s a strange feeling you’re not used to, since you don’t sleep – as you felt her tears on your eyelids, on your nose, on your lips.

They’re mad at you. Even Rose. They ask you what on Earth were you thinking. Why did you beat your head against a wall until your gem was almost _shattered?_

She still cries for you, but it’s not out of sorrow or even pity anymore. Not even frustration.

It’s out of fear.

Well at least she’s still crying for you.

Your dazed smile comes like whiplash to her, and you reach up to her face – her beautiful, soft, tear-stained face – and she visibly frets, like she doesn’t know how to feel about this. What to do about you. What she could do to make you _stop this._

She leaves you. Garnet replaces her beside your bed. Her words are blunt and dense and painful, just like the wall on your gem. “This is why you could never be with her,” she says.

You stop smiling.

 

Your ‘treatment plan’ isn’t exactly based on empirical research. All it involves is a quick, direct, and abrasive talk, just you and Garnet. She takes you down to the beach while the other two are preoccupied and you only understand the tone of the talk until she cracks and yells at you to shut up and _sit down._

She tells it to you straight. You _need_ to stop hurting yourself. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for Rose. It’s not good for any of you. It’s self-injury as provocation; it’s manipulative, it’s emotional blackmail, and it needs to stop.

You know it does. You lament with her. You understand and you _agree_ that it should stop. It’s just…

You don’t know how you could.

You’re not strong enough.

Garnet doesn’t offer you much sympathy. That’s not her problem, or Rose’s either. That’s yours and yours alone. Because you _are_ strong enough.

You stare after her as she walks away, incredulous, because there’s no way that could’ve possibly been the end of that talk. But Garnet doesn’t say another word about it.

You don’t suppose you have a choice. The advice boiled down to: get better. Somehow.

The only other alternative is to get worse.

 

You don’t exactly force yourself to get better. The only domain in your life that you actually ‘get better’ in is hiding it, pretending to be happy with the way things are between you and Rose. You can smile on demand, and laugh at the joke you don’t understand. Thousands of years pass in the blink of an eye, and you can dance like you’re not exclusively trying to impress her anymore, and you can sing like all those love ballads are just pretty frivolous words you say to each other all the time, like the humans do. No weight to them. No significance. No nothing.

You can fight now like you actually care whether you live or die. Like you have something to live for, rather than someone to die for.

You suppose that, technically, you’re still together, like she promised when she first recruited you for her rebellion.

You’re just not together in the way you’d like.


End file.
